I already suggested this as one of the options, i.e. names act as TLDs. DNS servers need to recurse first and then check the names in the blockchain, though only for ICANN and maybe OpenNIC TLDs. That way, ICANN's "google.com" takes precedence over our "com" and "google.com" but maybe not "sillyname9999.com".

But this idea is prone to other messy situations. Separating namecoin names is always a good idea. For instance, if an alternative to namecoin comes along, they can live together side by side.

Until a DNS proxy that uses namecoin comes along, one approach to using namecoin for host name lookups could be to provide the option to scan the names every time a block is mined and update/rewrite the users /etc/hosts (or windows equivalent). This might be a quick way of starting to use the namecoin chain for lookups. Even a simple script that does this every 10 minutes or so, getting the names from namecoind via RPC would do a reasonable job.

kind of a noob question:is there a way to see blocks that are maturing (less than 100 confirmations)? I've mined several blocks ("accepted" in poclm), but it's not showing up in my balance, nor is it showing up in my transactions list.

kind of a noob question:is there a way to see blocks that are maturing (less than 100 confirmations)? I've mined several blocks ("accepted" in poclm), but it's not showing up in my balance, nor is it showing up in my transactions list.

Until a DNS proxy that uses namecoin comes along, one approach to using namecoin for host name lookups could be to provide the option to scan the names every time a block is mined and update/rewrite the users /etc/hosts (or windows equivalent). This might be a quick way of starting to use the namecoin chain for lookups. Even a simple script that does this every 10 minutes or so, getting the names from namecoind via RPC would do a reasonable job.

An option for using socks enabled programs is to use ncproxy combined with SSH. SSH to localhost using the '-D' option to set up a socks proxy.

This sets up ncproxy to forward to the SSH proxy. You can configure firefox to use this socks proxy by going into 'Preferences/Advanced/Network/Settings' and adding '127.0.0.1' and '9055' in the Socks proxy area. You should also go into 'about:config' in Firefox, search for net.proxy.socks_remote_dns and double click on it to set it to true. This will cause DNS requests to go through ncproxy and then the SSH socks proxy.

I hacked a bit on the polipo HTTP proxy code and added simple namecoin support for DNS lookups. The modified code is in this git repository: https://github.com/doublec/namecoin-polipo. It needs libjansson for JSON parsing and libcurl for talking to the namecoind JSON-RPC server.

Once compiled, you can run it passing it the details about the namecoind server:

This will start the proxy, and it'll connect to the namecoind JSON-RPC server with the given details. It runs 'name_scan' to get the list of names. Any program using this proxy will have all .bit domains resolved by namecoind. Currently it only supports mapping to IP addresses. So namecoind values like the following work: {"map":{"":"192.0.32.10"}}. As an example 'bluishcoder.bit' hopefully resolves to the IP address of my server with my weblog using this version of polipo. It rescans namecoind when a request is made for a domain lookup and the last scan was more than 10 minutes ago.

To use it with Firefox (or other browsers) go into the network settings and set the 'http proxy' to localhost, port 8123.

I decided to do this to avoid needing to run the ncproxy script since I don't need socks support. Comments, suggestions, patches are welcome.

@doublec thanks for the modified polipo. What do you think about a modified resolver library that allows "sideloading"? How about this in /etc/resolv.conf:

I don't know much about DNS so avoided modifying or using any existing DNS code. What I have been able to do is get 'dnsmasq' to serve namecoind names using a standard dnsmasq build. eg. try:

Code:

dig @cd.pn bluishcoder.bit

This seems to work well. What I did was write a small program that does a name_scan and prints out the valid mappings in the same format as /etc/hosts. I then run dnsmasq with the option for obtaining names from this file. I have a script that runs every 5 minutes that rewrites this file and sends a SIGHUP to dnsmasq. The program to generate the hostfile is namecoin-hosts.c. It needs libjansson and libcurl. It can be built with:

I downloaded namecoin binaries and extracted them to the folder "namecoin" under ~/Downloads

I downloaded AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz and installed it using the instructions in pdf but still get errors (CL_PLATFORM_NOT_FOUND_KHR) trying to run the samples I did that command to check .so files but none were missing.

I copied the code from the example but tried to change a few things to namecoin instead of bitcoin but ended up with a .namecoin folder in my home directory whereas the namecoind binary is in a folder under downloads.

Considering the following discussion, http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2699.0did you choose a different elliptic curve for namecoin than the secp256k1 to reduce possible change of intrusion into bitcoin security by, for example the NSA.It would ease my concerns a lot if satoshi would make himself public, so that he could explain why he chose that particular curve...

and it is the latest kubuntu 11.04 I think as I downloaded it yesterday

I already found one thing that the icd-registration.tgz didn't go into the root directory when I was trying it last night so hopefully that will fix (or help fix) that other issue I had with not being able to run the samples.